The Departments of Architecture and Urban Design and Landscape Architecture of Bilkent University have the pleasure of inviting you to a lecture by Professor Felipe Rojas (Brown University) entitled “Vertigo-Sweat-Funk: Sensing the Past in Roman Anatolia” on April 2nd 2018 (Monday) at 17:45. The talk will be held in FFB-22, located in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture “New Building” in Bilkent University’s Main Campus.

Abstract
The past was everywhere in Roman Anatolia. Attention to the material remains of pre-classical civilizations in the region was intense and pervasive. People explored, excavated, and reconstructed Neolithic mounds and archaic tumuli; “translated” cuneiform inscriptions; and collected and displayed millennium-old statuary. Some wanted not just to see the past, but also to experience it directly. I use recent scholarship on the anthropology, archaeology, and architecture of the senses to shed light on Anatolian evidence that attests to the importance of embodied experience in making places meaningful. Through a series of case studies I analyze the urge to interact in fully embodied fashion with the physical traces of the past in the region: to dance on ruins, or stage boxing matches by them, and even to literally ingest what were thought to be material traces of antiquity.

Bio
Felipe Rojas is an assistant professor of archaeology at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork at various ancient sites in Turkey and Jordan including Sardis, Aphrodisias, Notion, Labraunda, and Petra. He is currently the associate director of the Notion Archaeological Survey and has finished a book entitled The Past in Things: Archaeophilia in Roman Anatolia, in which he examines Roman interest in pre-classical material remains.